{"id":74163,"date":"2016-05-30T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2016-05-30T11:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=74163"},"modified":"2016-05-27T13:46:39","modified_gmt":"2016-05-27T12:46:39","slug":"its-not-just-hiroshima-the-many-other-things-america-hasnt-apologized-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/05\/its-not-just-hiroshima-the-many-other-things-america-hasnt-apologized-for\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Not Just Hiroshima: The Many Other Things America Hasn\u2019t Apologized For"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The gutted Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall is seen after the atomic bombing of the city on Aug. 6, 1945. (Toshio Kawamoto\/Yoshio Kawamoto via Reuters)<\/p><\/div>\n

26 May 2016 – <\/em>This week, President\u00a0Obama will become the first sitting U.S.\u00a0president to visit Hiroshima, the\u00a0Japanese\u00a0city that the United States\u00a0nearly destroyed with\u00a0a nuclear bomb in 1945. While\u00a0the bombing is estimated to have killed as many as 150,000 people, Obama is not expected to apologize during his visit.<\/p>\n

It’s reasonable to ask, after more than\u00a070 years, why\u00a0not apologize for Hiroshoma? One well-worn argument\u00a0is that the bombing of the city (and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki that followed)\u00a0was morally justifiable as it was the quickest way to end World War II \u2014 a conflict that had already taken millions of lives.<\/p>\n

But another argument is broader and perhaps even more persuasive: Apologizing simply isn’t something the United States does, nor do many other countries. “We don\u2019t apologize, ever,” said Jennifer Lind, a professor at Dartmouth College and the author of “Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics<\/a>.” \u00a0This isn’t a unique\u00a0facet of American diplomacy, either. “Countries in general do not apologize for violence against other countries,” Lind added, noting that Germany and, to a lesser degree, Japan are outliers, as they have actually apologized.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0what else has America not apologized for?\u00a0Here\u00a0are a\u00a0few ideas.<\/p>\n

Agent Orange\u00a0in Vietnam<\/strong><\/p>\n

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A warning sign stands in a field contaminated with dioxin near Danang airport, during a ceremony marking the start of a project to clean up dioxin left over from the Vietnam War, at a former U.S. military base in Danang, Vietnam, Thursday, Aug. 9, 2012. The sign reads; “Dioxin contamination zone – livestock, poultry and fishery operations not permitted”. (AP Photo\/Maika Elan)<\/p><\/div>\n

During the Vietnam War, the United States sprayed about\u00a012\u00a0million gallons of Agent Orange, a herbicide, over areas\u00a0of\u00a0Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in a bid to both remove cover for\u00a0Vietcong and North Vietnamese fighters and kill food crops. Since then, the\u00a0Red Cross of Vietnam has estimated that about\u00a01 million<\/a> people were disabled or suffered health problems because of\u00a0contact with the herbicide.<\/p>\n

While the United States has sometimes disputed the link between Agent Orange and health problems, it has contributed more than\u00a0$100 million to help clean up the herbicide aftermath. Congress has also allocated (far smaller) sums\u00a0to health and disability programs that often target those who may have been harmed by Agent Orange. However, there has been no apology for this<\/a> or for\u00a0other controversies of the war, such as widespread U.S. use of landmines<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The 1953 coup in Iran<\/strong><\/p>\n

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President Jimmy Carter toasts the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran during New Year\u2019s Eve dinner at Niavaran Palace in Tehran on Saturday, Dec. 31, 1977. (AP Photo)<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1953,\u00a0democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister\u00a0Mohammed Mossadegh was overthrown in a coup.\u00a0In Mossadegh’s place, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was reinstalled as the shah of Iran, overseeing policies that were widely seen\u00a0as restrictive and corrupt. The shah\u00a0was in turn ousted from office by the 1979 Iranian revolution, which installed Iran’s current Islamic theocracy.<\/p>\n

In declassified documents, the CIA has acknowledged that the overthrow of Mossadegh was “carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government,” with the aid of the<\/a> British Secret Intelligence Service.<\/p>\n

However, the\u00a0United States and Britain have never apologized for their role in the coup, with the Obama administration recently stating that it had no plans to<\/a>. The negative effects of the coup have been acknowledged by some U.S. figures, notably former secretary of state Madeleine Albright. “The coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development,” Albright said in 2000<\/a>. “And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.”<\/p>\n

The 1973 coup in Chile<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Socialist Senator Salvador Allende, (eyeglasses), one of three presidential candidates, leaves Government House on Aug. 27, 1970 in Santiago, Chile. (AP Photo)<\/p><\/div>\n

The United States is also widely suspected of involvement in a bloody\u00a01973 coup that\u00a0ousted socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973 and put dictator\u00a0Augusto Pinochet in control of the country. Pinochet would go on to lead the country for 17 years, during which his regime was accused of the rampant\u00a0use of abduction, torture and murder.\u00a0The CIA has denied<\/a> any direct involvement in the coup, though it acknowledged it had been opposed to Allende’s presidency.<\/p>\n

In 1977, Brady Tyson, deputy leader of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, did attempt to offer an apology for the U.S. involvement in the coup, but he was quickly disavowed by the State Department<\/a>. When Obama traveled to Chile in 2011, he brushed aside a request for an apology<\/a> from a Chilean reporter.\u00a0“The history of relations between the United States and Latin America have at times been extremely rocky and have at times been difficult,” Obama said<\/a>. “But we’re not trapped by our history.”<\/p>\n

The West African slave trade<\/strong><\/p>\n

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President Bill Clinton watches African leaders sign an agreement on the prevention of genocide, at the Entebbe Summit for Peace and Prosperity held in Entebbe, Uganda Wednesday, March 25, 1998. (AP Photo\/Greg Gibson)<\/p><\/div>\n

The U.S. Congress offered an apology for slavery to African Americans in 2009 (though it was specifically worded in a way<\/a> that meant it could not be used as a legal rationale for reparations). But what apologies have been made to the\u00a0African countries whose modern history the slave trade helped shape?<\/p>\n

Not a lot, it turns out. Bill Clinton came close to making an apology during a presidential trip to Uganda in 1998. “Going back to the time before we were even a nation, European Americans received the fruits of the slave trade,” Clinton had told a crowd in a village outside<\/a> Kampala, the Ugandan capital, in what were said to be impromptu remarks. “And we were wrong in that.”<\/p>\n

At the time, critics quickly\u00a0argued that the wording of the comments implied regret rather than a formal apology. And the location was odd: Most slaves came from West Africa, not Uganda. Clinton had been in Senegal just a week before<\/a>, where the comments may have carried far more weight.<\/p>\n

Support for Congo’s dictator<\/strong><\/p>\n

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President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now Congo) and his wife Bobi Lawda wave to supporters from their limousine as they pass by in Kinshasa, Tuesday, Dec. 17, 1996. (AP PHOTO\/Michel Euler)<\/p><\/div>\n

Patrice Lumumba was the first democratically elected prime minister\u00a0of Congo. However, he was ousted just 12 weeks into his term and then killed four months after that on July 2, 1961. The assassination, which took\u00a0place just seven months after his country’s independence from Belgium and in the heat of the Cold War, has come to be viewed as a disaster for the troubled country.<\/p>\n

Belgium would acknowledge its role in the\u00a0assassination in 2002<\/a>\u00a0and offer its official apologies for the move. It’s unclear whether the CIA had any direct link to that plot, but it is known that it carried out huge covert operations<\/a> in Congo during this period. The United States would soon\u00a0go on to support\u00a0dictator\u00a0Joseph-Desir\u00e9 Mobutu (who later changed his name to\u00a0Mobutu Sese Seko)\u00a0and his immensely corrupt regime for decades. No apologies have been\u00a0made.<\/p>\n

The 2003 invasion\u00a0of Iraq<\/strong><\/p>\n

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A statue of Saddam Hussein is pulled down by U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians in Firdaus Square, in downtown Baghdad in this April 9, 2003, photo. (AP Photo\/Jerome Delay)<\/p><\/div>\n

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 is clearly one of the most controversial moments in recent history. Even if the war took out dictator Saddam Hussein, many would argue that it brought chaos to the wider region that persists to this day. At the least, the death toll among Iraqis was huge, though estimates are depressingly vague: Most suggest that a few hundred thousand<\/a>\u00a0people lost their lives, at the least.<\/p>\n

George W. Bush, the U.S. president who ordered\u00a0that invasion, has expressed some remorse for the faulty intelligence touted in the run-up to the conflict, but he has refused requests to apologize for the invasion itself. “I’m convinced that if [Hussein] were in power today, the world would be much worse off,” he told CNN in 2010<\/a>, denying that the war had been\u00a0a “lost cause.”<\/p>\n

Iran Air Flight 655<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Iranian children throw flowers into the sea as part of a 24th anniversary commemoration of the downing of Iran Air flight 655. (ATTA KENARE\/AFP\/GettyImages)<\/p><\/div>\n

On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes fired\u00a0two surface-to-air missiles at an aircraft it mistakenly believed was an Iranian F-14 fighter flying over the Persian Gulf. Instead, the plane was actually\u00a0Iran Air Flight 655 \u2014 a civilian airliner\u00a0flying from the nearby\u00a0Bandar Abbas International Airport, bound for Dubai. All 290 passengers and crew on board were killed.<\/p>\n

The shoot-down\u00a0happened at a time of tension between Iran and the United States, which was at that point backing Iraq in its war with Tehran. Despite the tragic nature of the incident,\u00a0Washington offered little contrition<\/a>. George H.W. Bush, the U.S. vice president at the time who was then on the campaign trail for the upcoming election, was even quoted as saying, “I will never apologize for the United States \u2014 I don\u2019t care what the facts are” (though this was not in direct reference to Iran Air Flight 655).<\/p>\n

In 1996, President Bill Clinton expressed regret over the incident, and the United States paid the Iranian government $131.8 million in compensation, with around $61.8 million going to the families of those killed. But no formal apology or acknowledgment of wrongdoing was ever made.<\/p>\n

What apologies have been made?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Looking over this short list (and thinking of the numerous other events\u00a0out there that we missed), it might be reasonable to wonder when America has actually apologized for foreign events. There are a few pretty clear examples: The United States apologized in 2010 for American experiments on Guatemalans in the 1940s<\/a>, for example, and in 1993, it said sorry \u00a0for its role in the\u00a01893 overthrow<\/a> of the Hawaiian monarchy.\u00a0Also, Washington\u00a0does tend to apologize more readily for smaller-scale incidents: In 2012, Obama apologized profusely<\/a> for U.S. military involvement in the burning of copies of the Koran\u00a0in Afghanistan in 2012.<\/p>\n

But overall, apologies tend to be the exception and nonapologies the\u00a0rule. The logic here is not moral but rather political.\u00a0Apologies are often controversial from the apologizers’ side, Lind explained, which means\u00a0that the apology may be tempered or halfhearted. In turn, people in the\u00a0country receiving the apology are\u00a0often not satisfied, creating more political headaches. There are further discussions about what actually constitutes an official apology and how it could affect calls for legal reparations.<\/p>\n

In the end, many countries \u2014\u00a0including the United States \u2014\u00a0tend to avoid apologies, apparently believing that the past is best\u00a0left buried.<\/p>\n

___________________________________<\/p>\n

Adam Taylor writes about foreign affairs for <\/em>The Washington Post. Originally from London, he studied at the University of Manchester and Columbia University.<\/em> Follow @mradamtaylor<\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 washingtonpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

26 May 2016 – This week, President Obama will become the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, the Japanese city that the United States nearly destroyed with a nuclear bomb in 1945. It’s reasonable to ask, after more than 70 years, why not apologize for Hiroshoma? But what else has America not apologized for? Here are a few ideas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}